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Beaton in the Sixties (Magill Book Reviews)

By the time photographer and stage designer Cecil Beaton died in 1980, he had published six volumes of his diaries, all of which had been scrupulously edited to insure that no offense was given, no libel action prompted. As Hugo Vickers observes in his introduction to Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1965-1969, Beaton was nothing if not a skillful re-toucher, and so, as in his most famous photographs, candor went by the boards and subjects were presented in the best possible light. He had a genius for making things pretty. Here, though, readers finally have something other than studio portraits: all the creases and crow’s feet have been left in. And it makes for a waspishly engaging account of the people and events in his life during the late-1960’s.

This was a decade of enormous cultural changes that threatened to upend the social world Beaton had for so long chronicled (and glamorized) on film. It is to his credit that he made the transition intact, moving easily back and forth between lunching with the Queen Mother at his home one week and smoking hash with Mick Jagger in Marrakesh the next. In spite of his age (and his increasingly despondent entries about its consequences--lack of energy and loss of looks), he was very much in the swim, flying from London to New York, Monte Carlo, Jamaica, Hollywood, Paris, and Greece. His accounts of yachting with Greta Garbo, photographing Pablo Picasso or Georgia O’Keefe, costuming Barbra Streisand or Katherine Hepburn are vivid, precise, and memorable. He does not miss a detail, and the details can be devastating: Mick Jagger “so huge of mouth that is was quite indecent;” Jackie Onassis looking “a mess with contorted face and dirty hair;” Garbo’s upper lip having “perished into little lines.” Yet for all the nastiness, he is capable of enormous good will towards old friends, of which he had many. And thanks to Vickers’s annotations (as entertaining as they are extensive) this elaborate network of friends and relations is made admirably clear.

Whatever his other talents, Beaton, from his youth onwards, had a knack for cultivating celebrities. Grandson of a blacksmith, he launched himself socially at Cambridge as one of the “bright young things” surrounding the eccentric Wiltshire aesthete Stephen Tennant. Ferociously ambitious, with a feline charm and a shrewd eye for style, Beaton parlayed his early photographic experiments into an eventual position as quasi-official photographer to the Royal Family.

The 1960’s were busy years, the last really productive ones of his career, as it turned out; and it can seem hard to believe that amid the constant comings and goings he could find time to set down such a juicy, well-observed record of it all. But any reader with an interest in the period as seen through these witty and withering eyes will be glad he did.